A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

The capacity of the mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do, you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad people and good people, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.

The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. That was the time that we had achieved the national goal of putting Americans on the moon. The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.

I was grateful to see President Obama's victory speech. I was over the moon to see the audience. There were about 60 percent white voters the other 40 percent were African Americans, Asian, Spanish speaking etc. I wept at that spectacle, it told me that the pundits that continue in our country to try to polarize us, to keep us apart, are not succeeding. Americans are waking up not only to the truth, but the truth in each other. Hallelujah!

What would happen if the moon were not there? Then our tilt could swing wildly over a large range, resulting in major temperature swings. If our tilt were more like ninety degrees, the north pole would be exposed to the sun for six months, while the south pole would be in darkness, then vice-versa. Instead, it varies by only about one and a half degrees - just a tiny variation, because the gravity from the moon's orbit keeps it stabilized.

I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains They could be staring us in the face and we just Don't recognise them. The problem is that we-re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.

This building we're in has doors and windows. If we close the doors and windows, we can't get out. People lock themselves inside a house of delusions. But they're only delusions. They can leave anytime. Actually there is no house to leave. There's not even any leaving. What we see are flowers in the sky, the moon in the water. As for the meditative powers of Zen masters like Hsu-yun, sometimes it's useful to meditate and sometimes it isn't.

It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul. That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."

Evidence of this [transformation of animals into fossils] is that parts of aquatic animals and perhaps of naval gear are found in rock in hollows on mountains, which water no doubt deposited there enveloped in sticky mud, and which were prevented by coldness and dryness of the stone from petrifying completely. Very striking evidence of this kind is found in the stones of Paris, in which one very often meets round shells the shape of the moon.

Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood!

There are innumerable worlds of different sizes. In some there is neither sun not moon, in others they are larger than in ours and others have more than one. These worlds are at irregular distances, more in one direction and less in another, and some are flourishing, others declining. Here they come into being, there they die, and they are distroyed by collision with one another. Some of the worlds have no animal or vegetable life nor any water.

Everyone who's been in space would, I'm sure, welcome the opportunity for a return to the exhilarating experiences there. For me, a flight in a shuttle, though most satisfying, would be anticlimactic after my flight to the moon. Plus, if I pursued a flight myself, people would think that was the reason I am trying to generate interest in public spaceflight. And that's not the purpose - I want to generate interest in long-range space exploration.

Most of Emily's backstory is written out between New Moon and Eclipse. I'm reading them as we're shooting the films. I haven't read Breaking Dawn yet. It's just too crazy. There's too much going on that you need a map. I just try to focus on one movie at a time. When we were doing New Moon press, people were already asking about Eclipse. I didn't read it until I was ready to go, so that it was fresh and I wasn't jumbled with all this other stuff.

There is a choice before us as people who live in a great world, so knit together that even America cannot stand quite outside it, or act as though it were situated somewhere on the moon! That choice is a choice - let me put it quite brutally - between heaven and hell. ... But it is not a choice between a heaven or a hell beyond the grave; it is a choice between making heaven or making hell on this side of the grave, and in this world, here and now.

I think when a man first discovers that two and two is four, there is 'beauty' in that; and we can see why. But if people stand and look at the moon and one says 'I think it's just beautiful tonight' and the other says 'The moon makes me feel awful' we are both 'clear'. A geometric shape - we know why we like it; and an unreasonable shape; it has a certain mystery that we recognize as real; but it is difficult to put these things in an objective way.

It's a very obsessive profession that you need to stay obsessed to get anywhere, and it's very easy for us to get obsessed and then nothing else matters. I was reading Somerset Maugham's novella, Moon and Sixpense, about this artist based on Gauguin's life. It was so beautifully written. You must be first rate because second rate you might not survive. If you're an accountant, you'll survive second rate. If you chance it big, you may not get anywhere.

Did they launch the last space shuttle yet?” – Sundown “I don’t follow.” – Ren “I’m just thinking maybe we should evacuate the whole planet. I’ve heard the moon is kind of nice this time of year.” – Sundown “Focus your ADD, Jess.” – Ren “I gotcha, brother. What you’re forecasting is six more plagues coming out of the northwest at maximum velocity with a mild chance of survival. Followed by the world getting swallowed whole in a vat of evil.” – Sundown

America is an idea, but it's an idea that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It's an idea that brings with it equality, but equality even though it's the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible, that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America. It's like hey, look there's the moon up there, let's take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That's the kind of America that I'm a fan of.

I turned my head to the sky, to the sun, to the stars, and put a little piece of my love in every star, in the moon, in the sun, and they loved me back. And I became one with the moon and the sun and the stars, and my love kept growing and growing. And I put a little piece of my love in every human, and I became one with the whole of humanity. Wherever I go, whomever I meet, I see myself in their eyes, because I am a part of everything, because I love.

In time, [a Martian] colony would grow to the point of being self- sustaining. When this stage was reached, humanity would have a precious insurance policy against catastrophe at home. During the next millennium there is a significant chance that civilization on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, a killer plague or a global war. A Martian colony could keep the flame of civilization and culture alive until Earth could be reverse-colonized from Mars.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion. ...I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course. And if the idea is accepted that the world's resources are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The extreme result is tyranny, war and even genocide. Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened - Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course It could be done.

Skeptics, who flatly deny the existence of any unexplained phenomenon in the name of 'rationalism,' are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public. People are not stupid and they know very well when they have seen something out of the ordinary. When a so-called expert tells them the object must have been the moon or a mirage, he is really teaching the public that science is impotent or unwilling to pursue the study of the unknown.

Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

This moment, this being, is the thing. My life is all life in little. The moon, the planets, pass around my heart. The sun, now hidden by the round bulk of this earth, shines into me, and in me as well. The gods and the angels both good and bad are like the hairs of my own head, seemingly numberless, and growing from within. I people the cosmos from myself, it seems, yet what am I? A puff of dust, or a brief coughing spell, with emptiness and silence to follow.

I'm a werewolf trapped in a human body." "Well, yeah, that's kind of the definition." "No, really. I'm trapped." "Oh? When was the last time you shape-shifted?" "That's just it - I've never shape-shifted." "So you're not really a werewolf." "Not yet. But I was meant to be one, I just know it. How do I get a werewolf to attack me?" Stand in the middle of a forest under a full moon with a raw steak tied to your face, holding a sign that says, 'Eat me; I'm stupid'?

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth. As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky.

I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I had never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamberpots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon - or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.

The cat will keep his side of the bargain. He will kill mice, and he will be kind to babies when he is in the house, just so long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up on the Wet Wild trees or on the Wet Wild roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

I would die to record in space. That would be the coolest. If I got the option of, going into outer space and hanging out there for a day, and then coming back home and dying the next day, or just waiting around to see if there's any opportunity for the technology to develop so that I might experience outer space sometime in the future, I would probably take the ride today and die tomorrow. I'd be happy just hanging out between the moon and the Earth, getting a view.

You must not think of time as a quantity, a period, a measure. Look at the sky," Gwynneth said. "The moon has now slipped away to another night, into another world. It was not the time it was here that you remember, Faolan, but rather the luminescence of the air, the blue shadows cast by the trees in its light. It was not the length of the time but the quality of the moon's light that you felt and remember." Gwynneth paused. "It is the value, the quality that lives on.

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?

Green is not just about renewable energy. It's also about creating a new direction for the whole economy. This requires government to step up, not step back, creating the kinds of mission-oriented public organizations that will enable us to tackle climate change - as ambitious as those that got us to the moon. It also requires the financial sector to be less short-term since we know that short-term finance has distorted incentives and directions in areas like biotechnology.

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

When my band MU landed on Maui in 1973 we were greeted by a wonderful group of peace loving brothers & sisters who we immediately formed a bond with. We had two instant roadies, Spider & Richard, who helped with every move of our musical equipment. We settled into our house on the edge of the rainforest that eventually became a portable studio. We started rehearsing and booked the Lahaina Civic Auditorium for a full moon concert starring MU and a local band The Space Patrol.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

Scientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more do you want?" We didn't spend it; it was done for political reasons. ... Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's objective was not to find out the origin of the moon by the end of the decade; rather it was to put a man on the moon and bring him back, and we did that.

It's just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense.

Darling," he said distractedly,"about the moon..." "Yes?" "I don't think it matters whether you want it or not." "What are you talking about?" "The moon. I think it's yours." Victoria yawned, not bothering to open her eyes. "Fine. i'm glad to have it." "But--" Robert shook his head. He was growing fanciful. the moon didn't belong to his wife. It didn't follow her, protect her. It certainly didn't wink at anybody. But he stared out the window the rest of the way home, just in case

If she were (looking into my eyes), she’d have seen how absolutely floored I was the first time I finally, truly saw her. The clouds moved at just the right moment, fully lighting her face by the moon. She was dazzlingly beautiful. Underneath thick lashes were eyes blue as ice, something cool to balance out the flames in her hair. I felt a strange flutter in my chest, like the glow of a fireplace or the warmth of the afternoon. It stayed there for a moment, playing with my pulse.

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